Wednesday, August 09, 2006

Simple Sponge Cake

For Weng.....hope this will help you if you do not have optima flour.

Ingredients:

4 eggs120 gm. sugar

100 gm. cake flour

65 gm. melted buter or cornoil1 tsp. vanilla essence

Method:

(1) Whisk eggs and sugar till light and fluffy.(2) Fold in the cake flour, preferably use your palms (open up like a claw) and fold lightly taking care not to deflate the eggs.(3) Pour in melted butter and vanilla essence and stir lightly.(4) Pour into a 9" round cake tin and bake at 175C for about 40 mins or till a skewer comes out clean.

For tube pan, i m referring also for the sponge cake. Was reading tips for baking sponge cakes on 'how stuff works' and it says to use tube pans for better heat distribution. But not necessary right?Thanks Aunty!!

funny some people call sponge cake as chiffon cake so they used tube pan. Tube pan cannot grease cos you need it to stand to get the tall look when cooled. This simple sponge cake is more for decorating cakes..You can use this sponge for cakes like blueberry, blackforest, etc etc

:) okies got it! So for this cake, when i use the 9" cake pan, should i grease n flour it?I did this time and also, what would be the best?To leave in the pan to cool or to take it out? And if i leave in the pan, should i invert the pan?Thanks for your patience in answering my questions!

For the simple sponge cake, just line the cake at the base will do. When the cake is cooked, remove from the oven and then leave it sitting on the wire rack for about 5 mins then remove from the tin and leave it to cool on a wire rack.

Hi Yochana, Jadelotus again :PI(wrongly) brought a pack of Top Flour instead of Cake flour. Could i still use it to make the sponge cake? The packaging reads suitable for chiffon cake, swiss rolls, butter cookies. :P

Hi Aunty! I'm Liz.It's so wonderful to view lots and lots of great recipes here!

Unfortunately, I've tried couple of times baking sponge cake & choc marble cake, but they always ended up either too hard, or uncooked in the middle part of the cake. I don't understand, what went wrong?

What's the best way to beat the ingredients? Would beating them too long cause the cake to collapse? Is there any guidance of the beating timing? I supposed it depends on the type of beating machine too, rite? Mine is a very small, beginner-kind-of-beater =)Thanks in advance for your tips.

Definitely don't overbeat or overcream. Overbeating eggs with sugar will make it turn watery and loses it's aeration and cause it to break and collapse. Roughly about 10 mins is more than enough for your small beater and for big beaters, 8 mins is enough.

Recently, I baked a pandan chiffon cake using a 20cm round cake tin. When i cut the cake, the whole cake collapsed! :( But i cut the cake when it was still warm. Is this the reason it collapsed? Pls advise. Thx so much.

Hi Aunty! Thanks for the advise, I'll give it a try again the next time around =)

Yesterday, I was trying out on a simple kind of cookie which recipe I've got from a magazine, called Matchstick cookies. It turned out nice, but after covering part of the cookies with melted chocolate ( I was using cocoa powder melted with hot water ), after cooling & set, the chocolate layer cracked. And the covered part also turned soft, it doesn't taste good any more, though the other half still ok.

Could it be caused by the cocoa powder instead of normal cooking chocolate melted on its own without additional water?

Yeah...I know matchstick cookies, I think it's by Vickie Chieng. No don't use cocoa powder with water. I will soften your cookies because of the water content. Use melted chocolate instead...get the cheap Tulip brand and it sets very well with cookies.

I tried baking your sponge cake. It was a failure for me. When i whisk the eggs and sugar, they turn out quite watery and when i use my hand to fold in the flour, there aare clumps and the flour did not mixed well, so ended my cake did not rise and was hard with alot of holes. Can enlighten me what went wrong?

I was going thru those feedback abt baking this sponge cake using cake flour, is there any baking powder required for this ??

Next, remember u told me to try out using optima flr for the strawberry cream cake. Then, how much water; eggs or etc. If I am not wrong, Sunlik sold two types of optima flr: one optima sponge flr n the other optima flour.

I would like to say sorry for asking so many questions and I must really thank u for all the help given to me recently.

Catherinep.s. hope to meet up with u one of these days. Which part of Singapore are u putting up ?

Hi catherine,the traditional sponge cake is used by chefs and many bakeries. They don't use the optima flour recipe much although some might use it at random. The traditional sponge cake is good for cakes that needs to brush with liquer as it will absorb and doesn't make the cake soggy.

Optima sponge cake is very fine and nic to eat but not suitable for heavy brushing of liquer. It will become soggy and not nice to eat.

whisking the eggs and sugar is simple. whisk till it's thick and creamy. The difficult part is folding the flour into the egg mixture. At this juncture, you might deflat the air bubbles and thus get a flat cake instead.

hw ru? I've been busy wit work...so I've missed baking for a while.I would like to try out chocolate optima sponge cake using the optima sponge flour recipe.So do i still use 250 gram flour and how much cocoa is needed?Or should I just purchase chocolate optima sponge flour...is it available.

Beautiful cakes on your blog!! I tried your Optima sponge recipe and it yielded exactly the kind of light, soft cottony texture you get when you order birthday cakes from commercial bakeries. It's what I'm aiming for. What I would like to know is, does your Simple Sponge Cake or Traditional Sponge Cake yield a similar texture to the Optima recipe you posted? Or is using the Optima Flour plus Ovalette the only way to get that texture? Can I add Ovalette to your Simple or Traditional sponge recipes to get the same texture?

Hi aunty,once again thanks for the prompt response...using van houten cocoa powder and also can I use tulip chocolate coating for ganache with whipping cream?I can't wait to try but gotta make a trip down to sunlik only this weekend.Phoon huat doesn't sell optima sponge flour...they don't even know wats that...hahaha.

hi aunty...i tried to bake the sponge cake 2 times oredi but it's cames out cracked on top like fatt kou..can u tell me wat goes wrong? i want to bake a birthday cake for my father on 3rd dec. hope u can reply to me asap tq

Hi Yochana, not sure if this is the right post to post this question in.. but i was just wondering.. for the optima flour sponge cake recipe, i noticed that there isn't any sugar required in the recipe... does it need any sugar, whereas the traditional sponge cake recipe does.. Is there a reason for this? Thanks!!! :)

How to make this cake more mosit? Can I add 2 tsp of milk? How do you keep this cake overnight and still maintain the freshness? I would like to bake my gal's cake a day before but not sure how to kip the freshness and moistness.Hope you can help. Thanks!